


Sparks In The Dark

by panda_shi



Category: Naruto
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Assassins & Hitmen, Bakery and Coffee Shop, Blood and Violence, Coffee Shops, Conditioning, Graphic Description, Invasion of Privacy, M/M, POV Second Person, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Stalking, Violence, Watching
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-20
Updated: 2020-05-20
Packaged: 2021-03-02 23:15:46
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,687
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24284971
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/panda_shi/pseuds/panda_shi
Summary: Tenzou is nothing more than a conditioned assassin. A shadow. He walks in the dark, not in the light. Until one day - tired, cold, exhausted - a stranger extends a hand in kindness. He's all Tenzou ends up thinking about.He's all Tenzou wants.
Relationships: Umino Iruka & Yamato | Tenzou, Umino Iruka/Yamato | Tenzou
Comments: 5
Kudos: 36





	Sparks In The Dark

**Author's Note:**

> Written in 2012, on my phone apparently. After a few minor tweaks, figured it can be uploaded as a standalone. 
> 
> Self beta'd. Might have missed some shit.

Your assignment had been easy.

In a street of a small neighborhood of quiet antique shops, red brick walls, white framed windows, young and chuckling students and quiet senior citizens, there is a cafe. Clear glass windows wet with the skies' tears, misty from the warmth confined within its wooden panel floors, soft green couches, and cozy yellow, warm hanging lights. 

You remember pale yellow ceilings from where you had stared up when a towel was placed over your head by warm, concerned hands and you dry up while a white mug of steaming coffee had been pushed over to you across a counter top. There had been a crack just a little towards the corner of that counter top, you remember, next to the empty plastic lidded baskets of scones and muffins (blueberry and bran, you recall the little label, clear block handwriting, blue pen). The crack had been fairly big, something made with a heavy object, with enough force to induce trauma if it had been made with skin, muscle and bone. Right above the neat rows of arranged salt and pepper shakers.

The hand had been warm, the color of milk tea, when it had brushed over your knuckles while wrapping gauze, swollen from the impact of dodging a killing blow from an assignment earlier. The touch had injected fear into you, not for being found out that you had just cleanly wiped out a basement full of money launderers, and most certainly not for being found out that you don't have an identity, that you are as faceless and void as the shadows that lurk in the dark alley corners, present but unseen, simply moving when you are directed, forced to move for light to shine and progress. A thing to command by nature.

No.

You had been more afraid of the adrenalin in your own veins. The racing emotion that sit like a wide ravine in your chest, cold and icy like the rain outside that had long tainted your lips blue, soaked your suit and loose tie and had made them heavy like the hardened stone that sits in the left side under your ribs (bruised maybe, from the fight but nothing that will not heal within weeks). It's your exhaustion that you are afraid of. There is a high that comes after a massive sweep of lives (even those with small throats that only required one hand to snap neck from spine and you had lost count after nine when doing the job, had counted fifteen when ticking off the list and sending information back to base; confirmation of deaths and a mission done cleanly).

You are afraid of yourself and what you might do to this stranger who had seen you, standing quietly under the freezing winter rain, ash and smoke and burnt flesh still clinging to your nostrils and waiting to be picked up by your captain (you understand the lateness; it's hard to drive in this weather), and had asked if you were okay. Had touched your shoulder and shook you while holding out the family-sized umbrella over your head. Had asked questions like, is your cellphone battery dead, are you trying to kill yourself, would you like to wait inside, would you like to use the phone inside to call someone? A cab?

And you hadn't answered then but simply stared at eyes that had been too bright as if the sun itself had been buried in a galaxy of browns and gold, the smell of oranges and cinnamon overriding the smell and taste of death. You inhale a lungful of that smell, filling your lungs with summer so sweet and spicy, once, twice and maybe he had mistaken those inhales for a nod, or something you are unsure of because you remember opening your mouth to tell him to go away, mind his own business but instead find a warm hand (fire on your icy skin) upon your wrist and then the rain is gone.

Muted by the quiet hum of the cold fridge lined with sweet treats kids these days love, things they like to use hashtags on, blog about, all about the gram, the glamour, popular likes and thumbs-ups.

Oh you're hurt, he had said, alarmed after he had handed you a towel, concerned and quickly digging for a small box under the bar.

You remember just sitting there while he fussed with your hand, remember measuring him, assessing his body language, how his eyebrows knit in concentration, how his pinky finger twitches with all his focus directed to the gauze being wrapped around your still cold hand, how the second button of his white button-down shirt uniform did not match the rest, slightly bigger, slightly darker.

Your buttons don't match, you had said and then you watch his hands fumble and with it a confused hum, quickly followed by a blush so bright that you watch it travel from the apples of his cheeks down the slender slope of his neck, the scar cutting across the bridge of his nose now nothing but a pale line.

You hear him say, oh I was hoping no one would notice, the words accompanied by a sheepish and a slightly breathless laugh from the surprise. That laugh, you had watched with something akin to hidden horror, makes his cheeks hollow slightly with the surprised inhale, makes the dimples on both cheeks hollow and the tendons of his neck pull and go with the stretch of muscles when the sheepish smile brightens his face. It's almost fragile, how the flush gradually recedes with the silence that fills the space in between and the only thing that is left is the soft whisper of bandages being wrapped and soft fingertips brushing against scars and slightly swollen knuckles.

His fingers had been so, so warm, gentle as they had brushed past the curve of your knuckles, dabbing yellow ointment on the scabs from the punches you had thrown earlier. There had been nothing intimate about how this odd stranger had moved with practiced ease, as if he's used to treating scabs and wounds; It's there in the movement of his hands, the flex of his muscles, how he subconsciously had chewed the left corner of his lower lip and how his eyebrows had furrowed just a little bit, the entire expression making the dimple on his left cheek wink, almost like a flirting gesture under soft lights of the cafe. With him that close and only a counter-top between the both of you, you can almost taste the sweetness of oranges, and that lingering bitterness that comes with tea leaves that had been steeped just right. He must have had that, you remember thinking, the thought quickly followed by the notion that it might have been his favorite too. You also remember thinking that the taste must have lingered along the corners of his lips and the curve of his tongue that you had watched lick the corner of said lips just as he had turned away to pluck something out of the med-kit.

It's beautiful.

It's hideous.

It's a fucking mockery of the life you don’t quite understand. 

(And maybe don’t deserve; after all, there is only the mission.)

Here is this man, with hands that seems to know only how to hold things together, hands that are smooth and knows nothing of snapping bones, the recoil of a gun, the weight of a field knife, or the sticky heat of blood running between fingers. He does not know how a man can scream when his nails are being tweezed off one by one oh so slowly for answers he keeps tucked somewhere under the sternum, or when he's being burned with hot iron rods, or when he's made to swallow hot water that cooks them from the inside out.

His hands doesn't know what it feels like to _hurt_ and _destroy_ and _rip_ _things apart_. All in the name of peace.

And yet you remember those hands being so beautiful, maybe even stronger than yours, remember reaching out to grab him by the neck, to squeeze it with your icy fingers that are still blue around the edges despite the heat of the cafe and this man, this blazing inferno of warmth and _life_ and blushes and mundane things like non-matching buttons and silly useless questions that don't mean anything like, are you okay -- you remember wanting to strangle him, to pull him over the countertop, pin his throat down on the cold surface and claw a hand through those mismatched buttons, make them pop and trace the line of the blush that you had watched earlier with your fingertips, dig nails into skin that must be smooth under the linen shirt too, and warm and _perfect_.

You want to sink yourself into this man, drown in the heat for a while because you can't take the feeling of your bones and joints quivering from the cold, from the phantom echo of begging words, screams wanting their lives back — annoying white noise that refuses to leave you alone when you’re this tired, this worn, this damn exhausted.

It's always like this, after taking so many lives. A genocide, that is.

You’re usually better when you aren’t spread too thin. You’re usually okay with the bloodshed, can tune it out but burying the horrors under lock and key. You’re okay because they made sure, growing up, that you _will_ be okay. That there’s no other option for you but to be okay — they taught you: no past, no future, there is only the mission.

But sometimes…

Well, sometimes, on nights like these, when it takes _hours_ to kill hundreds of people, when you have to fight _through_ them _,_ and environmental elements and your teammate running late, and the lingering hurt still blooming like a garden of dark wisteria and blood roses under the folds of your suit and laced up combat boots, you feel beaten.

And when you’re beaten, the adrenalin tends to run a little higher. The bloodlust a little sharper. You’re more primal than anything else. You want flesh, heat, you want, you want, you just want.

You’re a threat to those that don’t understand.

And that had been the reason why you had been so against agreeing to go with this man, to accept kindness that is wasted on men like you, who knows nothing but to destroy, so easily taking things that do matter from the world (fifteen children, the had their futures ahead of them, what did they know of the world?) without any effort. Like how you had been ready to sink your teeth against the curve of his lip while he fished for something in that box, mutters something about restocking on butterfly clips or bandaids and betadine while your hand had moved from the countertop for his neck, cold fingertips feeling the brush of the tips of his hair (soft, like silk upon your fingers).

It had taken only _one touch_.

You remember how you had jerked back, how the towel that had been resting over your head and keeping your ears warm fluttered to the ground and how the sudden recoil of you realizing that no, you can't do this to him, no you can't touch him, no don't do this to him, he doesn't deserve it, he is not a part of your target list, walk away, go away, leave him alone, he is not something to be used, abused and then discarded, hits you.

He's human.

You're not.

You don't remember much after that first jerking reaction.

You only remember a sharp pain from where you had stumbled backwards, remember seeing a confused and hurt and an even more worried expression when you had viciously shoved his hands backwards when he had attempted to help you back on your feet. You only remember spitting out cold words under the blanket of a threatening growl before you grab him by the elbow, had frozen for a moment when you saw how your crushing grip made him cringe, made eyes that are beautiful - always beautiful - widen with momentary fear, then you had pushed him away.

(You had too.)

Walked out.

Never looked back.

Kept walking even after he had chased after you, insisted on an umbrella and a towel and just to get him off your back, you take it, and had continued to walk away.

It had been a simple assignment. It had gone swiftly.

But it had also thrown you off kilter.

And now, a little over a year later, when you happen to be passing by this town again, returning from another assignment, you are watching him once more, for the first time, in the flesh.

It had taken you a month after the incident to remember him, when you had gone to pick up staples at the grocers and happen to pass by a tray full of ripe oranges. You had bought some, gone home, had it with tea and fell asleep dreaming of smiles and dimples and warm hands. Dreams that later turned to more, to words and smiles and flushes, of warm lips upon skin and gentle hands upon scars, of breaths against your ear and sheepish laughter against your shoulder. These dreams have been and are always distorted and never clearand you dismiss them as nothing more as a fleeting fancy. But when it didn't go away months later, it had been enough to drive you into looking up who he really is. To dig out data, to satisfy your curiosity because to you, this person -- this Umino Iruka -- is like an infection within a wound.

You need to get it out.

Standing where you are, ironically, under the winter rain again, even if you are wearing a coat this time while you watch him putter around the cafe handing bills to the people who are ready to depart, you look at the real thing as opposed to photographs and year books and juvi-records.

You share the same age, he’s older than you by about two months, born on the twenty-sixth of May, blood type O, seventy-five kilograms according to his latest details in this year's health insurance plan, one-hundred-seventy-eight centimeters, shoe size eleven. Born and raised in Konoha, orphaned at ten, lost both parents in a ferry accident, raised in the orphanage till eighteen, juvi-records present for vandalizing, forced-entry and property damage (those had been amusing to read, he had quite a playful streak as a child) and someone holding a bachelor's degree in education. Which really makes sense why Iruka spends his winter holidays working full time at a cafe that had belonged to his deceased parents. Summers too. Along with evenings from six to eleven, after school, where he holds extra tutoring classes for kids who require the extra help. Sweet Cup is a small establishment where a staff of four is more than generous enough to keep it running. Iruka keeps two childhood friends running it while he teaches, lives alone in a studio apartment that is a size of a shoebox about two streets down the road and owns no vehicle or driving license of any sorts.

Iruka is so _normal_ and so _alive_ that even in his conversations with people through the phone, through text messages, and emails, the trait stands out like a beacon -- animated, friendly, sweet, loud, caring and forgiving, nurturing and gentle, nagging and berating and naive and irrational and earnest and always helping and always giving and goddamn stupid and ignorant for not knowing what lingers in the corner alleys and shadows of the night and people's blind spots because how the hell can such a person be like _this_?

If it hadn't been for the juvi-records, you would have been prepared to believe that he is nothing more than a wallflower of a fucked up, twisted society. And yet it is this mundane wallflower that draws you. It is this man and his smiles that has invaded your sleep, plagued your mind when it wanders during meditation, or when you're not planning for an assignment, when you're on a plane, or driving, or eating, when you shop and see oranges, when you take the nearest body and specifically choose someone with brown hair, brown eyes -- it's driving you mad.

You don't understand why you're even standing here, just watching him.

The crux of the matter is that you want it. You want him. You know that once you get a taste, once you've satisfied the hunger, it'll go away. It'll be easy to spit it out once you've chewed, swallowed the flavor and move on. It's a trend, like how everything is in the world. It _has_ to be.

And so it will be.

Perhaps you've been standing there for too long, perhaps he has noticed because you watch him look at you curiously from beyond the slightly misty cafe glass window, you watch him squint his eyes and rub the sleeve of his button down shirt over the glass to get rid of the mist, probably to see clearer. The gesture makes something in your chest twinge, fills it with warmth and the corner of your lip twitch in amusement at the comical face he's wearing as he struggles to look beyond the sheets of rain and winter mist.

He's beautiful, even like _this_ with his nose flattened on the glass, face scrunched up like the tip of a ripened peach.

You don't command your body this time, you go with it instead, following your own footsteps till you step through the threshold of the cafe, the bell ringing above your head and rain water dripping. You watch him stare at you in stunned silence as you shake your coat off, hang it on the hook by the door along the rest of the coats of the other patrons, reaching up to adjust the scarf around your neck before you tug your gloves off.

The last patrons shuffle out, brushing past you and calling cheerful goodnights towards Iruka, and Iruka who is always nice and always smiling return the farewells but he doesn't take his eyes off you. You can see familiarity blaze behind those irises, you can see his eyes widen briefly before those dimples appear once more, hollow and prominent, moving with the smile as he makes a gesture with his hand as if to say, _make yourself at home._

You do just that, even if you feel out of your element. You move towards the bar, four seats away from the corner, next to the scone baskets that are not quite empty this time, by the same seat where you can easily see the crack on the marble top and lines of salt and pepper shakers. He hands you a towel from the other side of the counter, tanned fingers gripping the edge of the counter top, eyes bright and clear as he just _looks_ at you and asks, what can I get you?

The answer dances around the tip of your tongue as you look at him, notice that his hair is a little longer than last you remember, that his buttons are matching this time and the only thing that makes his uniform stand out like before is a small pink stain on the folded cuff around his left elbow (food coloring, you deduce, probably from one of the colorful donuts on rack by the bagels behind him or the buttercream of the cupcakes in the fridge).

You watch him tilt his head in question a little, watch the flush rise to his cheeks and listen to his sneakers shuffle on the floor behind the counter, his eyes flickering towards the menu spread. He is embarrassed, maybe because of the way you are staring at him and you remember to hum as you really think of what to order from the menu.

You're asking me what can you get me but even if you can get it for me, I probably shouldn’t take it, anyway. I am not like you, I can't be around you even if you're all I can think about. You're better suited for the living and that's all you really know and all you should know. Why would you take in a stranger who makes a living off of blood and screams and broken bones, when the red stains cakes under the nails and goes deeper than just skin and the only weight such hands would know is that of a weapon? Why would you willingly still look at me like this, when you must have seen it, must have heard the news the next morning, about an entire family wiped out in the next district over, when you must have smelled the blood and the smoke, must have seen the tallying numbers of bodies in the scratches on my fist. And even now you're looking at it, this conditioned monster who sleeps like a baby after a bloodbath — what are you thinking about? Do you still see the scabs that you had tried to fix that night or do you see the lives of children? Of helpless people? Do you see the way I live, what I carry with me, the scars on my knuckles, under my sleeves and coat, and you still willingly look at me like this?

I don't want your concern. I don't want you to pity me.

And now you're smiling again and goddamn you, why? You're asking me if you can surprise me now, if you can guess what I want if I'm being indecisive. You're infuriating. You're a distraction. I only want one thing.

It's always been one thing.

And so, with whatever honesty a monster like you can manage, you tell this Umino Iruka the truth, for it’s the least you can do for someone good:

"Whatever you can give me."

You watch the smile on Iruka’s lips soften.

And for the first time in years, you feel your mouth twitch and remember what it feels like to smile too.

FIN

**Author's Note:**

> Sooooo modern day! I probably won't be expanding on this. I dunno. Maybe? If this inspires you, well, feel free to use it as you like!
> 
> Feel free to yell below, or tumblr @pinkcatharsis


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